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- A Recipe For Disaster (For Recipes)
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Rest In Peace Independent Bookstores
I was looking for some details on bookstores that have closed in Toronto over the last 30 years. While searching, I found a blogTO post from 2016 about the “10 lost but not forgotten bookstores in Toronto.”
Among them was The Cookbook Store, which the article describes as “less a conventional bookstore than a place for food lovers to congregate and meet chefs.”
The Cookbook Store was unique.
People came from across the country and around the world to shop there.
When it closed in 2014 and was partially reborn as a section of another bookstore, it was a national news story covered by Toronto Life, Maclean’s, CBC, CTV, The Toronto Star, The National Post, The Globe and Mail and other news outlets.
When I first moved to Toronto and learned of The Cookbook Store’s existence, I remember thinking, THAT’s a functional business, just selling cookbooks?
Books are a tricky retail business on their own.
Only making money just by selling cookbooks has to be harder, right?
The vast majority of authors, both traditionally and self-published, struggle to make a living from their work.
And cookbooks are the redheaded stepchild of the publishing industry.
Don’t get me wrong, people love cookbooks.
But book publishers have a love-hate relationship with them.
As a result, most cookbook authors are among the lowest-paid scribes.
Unless you’re Martha Stewart, Jamie Oliver or Snoop Dogg, writing a cookbook isn’t a great way to get paid.
Snoop Has A New Cookbook
How The Mobile Internet Ruined The Cookbook
Since the dawn of the iPhone and the explosive growth of the mobile internet, recipe blogs and information sites have severed the recipe from the cookbook and democratized recipe writing for any would-be home chef.
At first, that sounds great.
Get the recipe you need, but don’t buy the whole darned cookbook.
It’s the analog to the iTunes-ification of information. Buy or listen to one song, and screw the entire album.
If you’re looking for just a specific recipe, this is a fantastic experience, right?
In an effort to glean any profit from their writers and appease the search engine optimization gods, recipe sites have resorted to flooding their pages with ads and layering in so much superfluous writing that they render their own content challenging to navigate, annoying, and just plain awful.
How Google Ruined The Recipe
The Google search typeahead text for “why are recipe websites so… bad, long, slow, annoying and glitchy” kinda tells the story.
Every site follows the same frustrating pattern.
There’s a sappy statement about how the author loves this recipe.
There’s a diatribe about a usually-deceased family member who taught them how to make it back in their hometown of bullshit nowhere.
There’s a weirdly bolded and underlined breakdown of the macronutrients and ingredients, but usually not in a particularly useful way.
And after scrolling past some banners, videos, and cross-links to other recipes you weren’t looking for, you might finally find the actual friggin recipe.
How The Recipe Was Ruined By Google (As Explained By Google)
Recipe search is so important to Google that they defined a “structured data format” specifically for recipes, which led to this horrible experience.
Most of us eat, like, daily. So we search for recipes all the time.
Getting the recipe search experience “right” is less a money-making venture and more a trust and confidence builder for the search giant.
A Rock A Day Keeps The Dentist In Business
When Google started adding AI Overviews and text-based generative artificial intelligence summaries into their search results, things went from annoying to downright dangerous.
Google told some folks searching for how to get cheese to better stick to pizza that they could use “non-toxic glue.”
Delicious!
The search engine also suggested we eat at least one rock per day.
Yum!
Amazon Is Totally On Top Of This AI Cookbook Situation (Not)
In the years since OpenAI witlessly released ChatGPT upon us, something even more disconcerting has happened to the cookbook.
Entire books of recipes are springing up, written exclusively by artificial intelligence.
Recipes that no one has ever actually cooked.
Food no one has ever actually eaten.
In some cases, in whole or in part, ripping off the works of bloggers and chefs who painstakingly assembled those awful recipe blogs in the first place.
Some of the folks who “write” these books do so shamelessly, albeit somewhat humorously. Take a gander at The AI Cookbook: A taste of the future. The book is described as “a must-have for anyone interested in the possibilities of combining AI and cooking.”
Amazon is now filled with all sorts of non-human-written books.
To mitigate the proliferation of AI-generated works, Amazon now limits self-published authors suspected of overusing AI to publishing three AI books per day.
It’s Google’s World, You Just Search In It
After spending more time tweaking their large language models, Google’s recipes are less likely to include glue and rocks.
However, the “zero click” experience Google enabled with AI Overviews is limiting the website traffic to and ad revenue of those horribly written recipe sites, which were formatted and written for Google Search in the first place.
To stay in business, recipe writers and cookbook publishers may need to revert to old tricks.
Some businesses are planning to erect subscription-based paywalls to limit web and AI crawlers from consuming hand-written, and chef-perfected recipes.
Others have suggested a different route: create content that can’t be crawled.
The saviour of the recipe blog might be the physical, real-world, published cookbook.
In the interim, I suggest you limit your rock consumption to one a day and find better cheese for your pizzas (probably in Windsor).
“I worry that a book industry driven mainly by profit will be tempted to use AI more and more to generate books. If it is cheaper to produce novels using AI (no advance or royalties to pay to authors, quicker production, retainment of copyright), publishers will almost inevitably choose to publish them. And if they are priced cheaper than 'human made' books, readers are likely to buy them, the way we buy machine-made jumpers rather than the more expensive hand-knitted ones.”
– Tracy Chevalier
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